Winning Thoroughly
by Mirthful-Malady
Summary: Hp/Homestuck Crossover. Jade is Harry. The players never won the game, but escaped to a world very different than their own. Here they enter the cycle, and are reborn, sans their memories and find themselves a part of a very different game. Very AU for both worlds, ignores horcruxes. Collab with 7ly.
1. Childhood

He's floating, he realizes. Except he isn't him, but a her. What? Of course she's a her. She's always been a her. She's floating—not like under the harsh pressure of water—but in the air. Attached to nothing. There is a great orb—a planet?—above her. It's beautiful. Wispy white clouds dance on its blue surface and as she watches, mesmerized, images form in them. A world filled with black and white corpses, red blood staining a strange checkered landscape. A boy, with eyes of cerulean and wind ruffled hair. She knows him and she aches because she can't remember his name. And a dog—warm and soft and loving and oh so loyal—

Harry finds himself back inside his cupboard, as always. It's cramped and dark and its cobwebbed confines are so very different than the blue world of his dream.

He's had these dreams as long as he can remember. They're not like his other dreams, with the red haired woman and the green light, the screaming and the sound of wind. That one is a memory, he thinks, because it's the same every time.

Aunt Petunia yells at him when he asks her about the green and red dreams. Says he should quit with his freakishness and get back to weeding her too-perfect garden. There's always a tightness in her face that he can't recognize. Maybe it's fear or guilt? He can't tell.

He ties a string around his finger to remind himself not to ask again.

He likes the garden, so he doesn't mind when his aunt tells him to tend to it. He wishes he could grow some pumpkins though. He just knows that they could be so terribly useful.

Sometimes he dreams of a place with glass walls and lots of pumpkins. He likes that place, which is both familiar and not.

He knows there's something different about him. Something more than the 'freakishness' that his aunt is so fervent in stamping out of him. Sometimes he thinks he can almost taste it, whatever it is. And then it floats just out of his reach like a particularly stubborn bubble. Or maybe that is the 'freakishness?' But it sure doesn't feel freakish!

There's a cat lady that lives down the street. Not an actual lady that's a cat (what a horrible idea!), but an odd old lady who has way too many of the godforsaken creatures. He can't understand why anyone would want to live like that. Cats are so smelly and rude! And they are for chasing, not petting. How some people didn't understand such a simple thing was extremely perplexing.

She certainly seems like a more 'freakish' person than him, though whenever he thinks that he feels kind of guilty, so he tries not to. But when his aunt would leave him with the woman while her family went out to do 'normal people things,' it's sometimes hard. Those are the days he thinks he hates the most. After a few days like that he hated nothing more than the foul whiskered creatures, except possibly their caretaker. She was the farthest thing from a proper host. She kept serving him this terrible stale cake. At least he thought it was cake. At some point, in the very, very distant past he'd been allowed a piece, and it looked a lot like what she served him. Didn't taste at all the same though! Mrs. Figg is not a very good cook. The word cook probably shouldn't be allowed anywhere near her. [ ]

Harry didn't really have any human friends. Which was perfectly fine with him because they were really confusing! And most of them were taller than him, even in his age group. Which really grated on him. They also didn't understand the wonders of pumpkins. He wondered if he would ever find anyone that did. It was a tragedy, really. Pumpkins were such fantastic things! One day, Harry decided, he would teach the whole world about the wonders of pumpkins so that everyone could enjoy their magnificence.

Sometimes, when he was in the garden, doing garden-y things, he would talk to the snakes. Not like Mrs. Figg did with her cats, but like a completely rational person who was actually capable of speaking their language, which totally wasn't crazy at all. Other than their constant mentions of dead rodents, they weren't the best conversationalists, but it was still nice to have someone to talk about pumpkins to! They weren't very good at changing the subject, so Harry could keep talking about them for hours.

He had secretly given names to the snakes he talked to most often - secretly, because he had a sneaking suspicion they wouldn't appreciate them. Which was silly of him to think because LuLu and Godfrey were perfectly acceptable names for snakes! He'd named one of them Sir Fido, who had then been rude enough to tell him to never try naming anything ever again. He didn't listen because he was a rebel, gosh darn it! And not listening to a snake who had absolutely no authority over him at all was most definitely a rebel-y thing to do. He was just (one-sidedly) chatting with Geraldine Cooper about the importance of proper care during the first stages of pumpkin growth (it really affects color later on) when a rather menacing-looking brown owl (Was that a tawny owl? He wasn't sure) swooped down next to him, with a yellowish envelope tied to its leg.

"How can you fly like that? That must be awfully annoying! I'm Harry. Do you want some help with that?" Birds didn't usually talk back to him, but just because something doesn't talk back doesn't necessarily mean they can't understand you. And it was almost as good as talking to snakes, anyway, and sometimes better, since birds never complained about his pumpkins! The envelope was thick and a little bit waxy. Harry thought it was kinda neat.

His name was written in a spidery green script, which he thought must have been very difficult to manage. His handwriting looked like the demented wanderings of a piss drunk centipede that had fallen into a well of ink. The owl flew off with nothing more than a rather haughty glance back.

"Well that was odd," he commented to Geraldine, "I wonder what this letter's about?" He noticed he wasn't talking to anybody.

"Gosh darn it Geraldine, could you stop running off?"


	2. The Forest

Quirinus Quirrell contemplated the forest. It was, he observed, full of trees. This did not really come as any great surprise to him seeing as that was a general defining characteristic of forests. What did surprise him however, was the fact that the trees seemed to be animate, which was not a general defining characteristic of normal forests, or even most magical ones. He considered that fact again, and shrugged to himself. Sometimes, he supposed, a being all up and got the feeling that they needed to think a bit more. He couldn't really understand why, exactly, they thought that they needed to do that seeing as he thought that most people in general thought much too much and it got in the way of doing much more important things, such as appreciating the miracle of the simple things. Like pixie dust.

He took another snort.

He felt his heartbeat and thoughts begin to slow, as he rode out the pixie dust high. The trees looked much more agreeable this way, he decided. They were vaguely disapproving in the way that he had come to associate with librarians who caught him drinking from his hip flask in a library. He supposed he could understand the sentiment, in the vague way that a fourth grader could understand that astrophysics in some way involved math.

He watched as streaks of color darted about in the corners of his eyes. Tricky little buggers they were, always showing up when his mind was afloat in the gentle haze of a pixie high. He'd tried to pin them down and get a good look at them, but they always disappeared when he tried. It was like trying to catch smoke with his bare hands, the difficulty of which he was intimately familiar with. The smoky little bastards were all about being indecisive, never could stick to being just one thing. He tried being subtle about it of course, as much as he was capable of being subtle. He'd wait until the little buggers were all up and dancing away at the edges of his vision, like a drunk little party, and then he'd slowly move his gaze over to them, all sneaky like. But for all his sneakiness, the little colored bastards were sneakier. They were on to him. They were always on to him, like they could see the future or read his thoughts or something...

At that, he checked his occlumency shields, which had the most unfortunate tendency to spontaneously collapse. Nope. They still held, if a bit shakily. He did have some very strong and determined thoughts, even in his currently lethargic state. They were always trying to get out and do things. What these things were he wasn't quite certain, but he had the distinct feeling that he would not like them very much at all.

And the colors were still there. He supposed he would have to admit defeat in the face of their superior technique. As always.

It was a little frustrating, but he didn't particularly mind.

It occurred to him that he had an actual reason to be in the forest, other than his unceasing battle of wills against the colors. Now if he could only remember what it was.


	3. Hagrid Reflects

The first time Hagrid saw Aragog, he knew he had to have him. So he took the spider from the stranger whose pocket he had ridden in, and back to his dorm in the large stone castle. He couldn't help but think that something was wrong with Aragog, other than the fleeting feeling of familiarity.

* * *

Sometimes he thought he could remember another spider, large and fearsome. And a cliff, with a girl whose mind was just as monstrous and twisted as the creature whose company she kept. He think he loved this girl, once.

* * *

Hagrid has always dreamed of flying. When he was young and full of folly he fancied that he would one day grow wings and fly away. Then he was older and dreaming of cliffs and pain and girls with spider eyes made him wary of the sky. But the dreams were still there, in the corners of his mind like tattered cobwebs.

* * *

Sometimes he thinks that he can hear the creatures he works with talking to him. It is a whisper, barely there brushing against his mind. It reminds him, sometimes, of dreams he used to have of vast lands filled with creatures of fantastical forms, vast multitudes of white hide and scales and feathers.

* * *

In his dreams the whispers aren't whispers but true voices and he can hear them all, a cacophony of joyous sounds and vicious war cries. In his dreams he can feel them, each of them a brilliant spot of light, connected to him, circling him like a hundred thousand stars. In his dreams, he knows that he is not alone, surrounded by those stars. He feels their power, and he knows he could surround himself with the warm friendship of these creatures, feel the reassurance of their minds against his own, or lead them into battle and have his shining white army painted in all the lurid colors of his enemies. He thinks he's done it once-painted with those colors. Then he wakes up and doesn't know whether to laugh or to cry because he's _Hagrid _and there is no white army of beasts, no field of stars touching his mind and part of him _knows _that half of what he saw was never his dream in the first place.


End file.
